Earlier this year, I wrote about a Seventh Circuit decision that denied inmates the right to play Dungeons and Dragons. In addition to being regulated by the law of the state, D&D also has an elaborate legal system of its own. For some thirty years, Dragon magazine ran a “Sage Advice” column where readers could write in with questions about the meaning of the rules and their application to various situations.
Sadly, the column recently shut down (superseded by the internet). But there is a searchable online archive of all the questions and responses. The Comics Alliance blog reprints a few of the most interesting ones, including some that are clearly relevant to constitutional law.
Like the US Supreme Court, the Sage was reluctant to give a definition of marriage:
Q: My male paladin wants to marry a chaotic-evil lady magic-user. Is this OK? [note by IS: the rules require paladins to be lawful good].
A: This question is actually very complex. To answer it, we would have to defined marriage itself. [which the Sage then conspiciously fails to do].
Evidently, the issue of interalignment marriage was such a divisive one in the D&D community that the Sage was unwilling to risk its political capital by addressing the issue. Similarly, the US Supreme Court ducked the question of interracial marriage bans for many years, and more recently has tried to duck the issue of same-sex marriage. And of course the Court has never yet defined marriage in any comprehensive way.
On the other hand, Sage did take a position on a question related to the Second Amendment right to bear arms:
Q: In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, how much damage do bows do?
A: None. Bows do not do damage, arrows do….
The full answer does explain that bows can do damage after all if the archer hits an opponent with the bow.
Sage’s position is nearly the opposite of the well-known NRA slogan “guns don’t kill people, people do,” though perhaps he would fault the bullets rather than the guns as such. A ban on missile weapons (or at least on their ammunition) would seem to be constitutional within the D&D legal system.
The Comics Alliance post also includes a variety of questions relevant to family law, especially regarding what to do if characters want to have children or become pregnant. Sage also emphasized the limits on the Dungeon Master’s power to address such matters, much as the Supreme Court has occasionally emphasized limits to the enumerated powers of Congress, including over family law:
Q: One of my players wants to have a baby; what should I do?
A: Your question had me momentarily confused. If one of your players wanted to have a baby, you, the Dungeon Master, should be the last person she should talk to.
The Sage archive contains answers to many other legal questions that have come up in the real world, such as whether or not good characters can use torture (paladins are categorically forbidden to use torture, but chaotic good characters may torture enemies “if the end result is good and it cannot be achieved any other way”), and how to get a divorce.
Benjamin Davis says:
Would love to know the date of DR 47.
December 17, 2010, 5:23 pmBest,
Ben
Syd Henderson says:
Q: My male paladin wants to marry a chaotic-evil lady magic-user. Is this OK? [note by IS: the rules require paladins to be lawful good].
A: You don’t expect them to live in sin do you?
December 17, 2010, 5:29 pmroy says:
I’m a long-time player and DM; we recently had a situation that would make a good issue-spotting hypothetical.
The party was attempting to aid townsfolk who had become zombie-like (physically functioning, but unable to make rational decisions) and dangerously obsessed with eating. In order to pass through and find an ultimate cure to the problem, the party acquired sleeping potions on the black market and induced the food-zombies (“foodies”) to drink them by calling them “potions of roast-beef sandwich”. The potions had expired and poisoned all the foodies. The party attempted to check the health of the foodies, but misjudged (never roll a 1 on a Heal check) and determined they were safe. These foodies later died due to the poison. The party was able to reach their goal and cure the remaining foodies. It is a given that the party was acting in good faith after failing to find a less dangerous solution to the problem, as all characters are either good-aligned or good liars.
December 17, 2010, 5:32 pmIlya Somin says:
Would love to know the date of DR 47.
Judging by the issue number, it was probably sometime in the 1980s.
December 17, 2010, 5:49 pmAnderson says:
Oh my word. I remember reading the early ones in the magazine. (First issue I ever bought was # 50, but I acquired earlier ones later.) Wish I still had all that stuff.
December 17, 2010, 5:50 pmAnderson says:
December 17, 2010, 5:53 pmJHW says:
A marriage is a comprehensive union. Given that a union necessarily involves mutual coordination toward a common good, and opposite-alignment characters necessarily lack the moral complementarity necessary for such coordination, as a matter of principle it is simply impossible for a real marriage to exist between a lawful good and chaotic evil character.
Revisionists who think that marriage is merely about “love”, “emotional commitment”, or “joint slaying of dragons” are ultimately committed to a view of marriage that has no principled objection to incest, polygamy, and dwarf-halfling unions. The attempt to institutionalize this redefinition in adventuring companies will undermine marital norms generally, with devastating consequences for the good of society, especially children and those threatened by rampaging orc hordes.
December 17, 2010, 5:55 pmAnderson says:
– Ilya, do you read The Order of the Stick? Catnip for D&D veterans.
December 17, 2010, 5:56 pmChris Travers says:
Knights of the Dinner Table is also worth reading.
OMG A Gazebo?!?!?!?!
December 17, 2010, 6:03 pmJerry Mimsy says:
To know when a Dragon came out (or many other TSR or Judges Guild items), the Acaeum is a good place to go.
Acaeum Dragon Index
#47 was dated March 1981, so it probably came out in January or February of 1981.
Interesting cover on that one.
December 17, 2010, 6:14 pmmatt d says:
And on point, too: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0050.html
December 17, 2010, 6:38 pmAnderson says:
And more legally oriented: what Celia says in the last panel here is so great, I bought the T-shirt. Thus symbolically fusing my D&D-nerd/lawyers aspects.
… Thanks for the great link, Jerry!
December 17, 2010, 6:43 pmJozxyqk says:
OOTS was great and hilarious in its early days, but Burlew has become (in classic DM fashion) obsessed with the glorious intricacies of the story/world he has wrought … the comic is now mostly massive blocks of text with a half-assed joke tacked on in the last panel.
Penny arcade’s recent D&D focus, on the other hand, has been spectacular. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/6/22/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/3/4/
December 17, 2010, 6:50 pmGuy says:
I’ve always been curious about a justice system in a world where you can Detect Evil. Can evil characters be imprisoned on that basis? Or must they commit a crime? Is a person’s alignment admissible in evidence? I suppose that’s like propensity evidence. What standard of scrutiny, if any, would apply to discrimination on the basis of alignment?
December 17, 2010, 6:54 pmLarryA says:
Well, not really opposite. The question concerned the damage done by the arrows. The NRA and other gun organizations often research and publish articles on the effects of different bullets and cartridges. Choice of targets lies with the shooter, both in real life and D&D.
Somehow I can’t see a dungeonmaster lasting very long after attempting any such ban.
December 18, 2010, 12:16 amTW says:
I don’t see why not. Evidence of a person’s “alignment” is admissible under certain circumstances in our own court system. Where a person’s character is an essential element of a charged offense, reputation and opinion evidence, which is normally inadmissible, may be admitted under FRE 405. In a D&D court of law, I suppose they could create a pool of court-certified wizards who have demonstrated expertise in casting “detect dishonesty” or “detect propensity to commit violence” spells.
December 18, 2010, 1:18 amPete says:
It depends on the composition of a particular land/nation/society. Generally evil NPCs avoid the members of society that are overtly good. Clerics, Paladins, and others of their ilk. They can ruin your day. Especially PCs/adventurers. PCs have plenty of free time to meddle and can be annoyingly dogmatic about thievery, murder, and general hooliganism. Best to avoid all PCs as a rule.
Most NPCs in DnD worlds are of a neutral alignment of one stripe or another depending on the local ruler. They remind me most of Kurosawa’s peasants in The Seven Samurai, with the bandits being the monsters and the samurai being player characters.
December 18, 2010, 1:39 amD.R.M. says:
An evil alignment isn’t evidence that a person breaks the law; after all, there’s a lawful evil alignment. So detect evil doesn’t serve as very good evidence of propensity to commit a crime.
December 18, 2010, 4:15 amGuy says:
So no laws declaring all evil people are detainable without process? Why not? Seems like a useful tool for a good society.
Can you Detect Chaos?
That’s probably true regardless of alignment, protagonists in any action/adventure genre tend to attract trouble.
December 18, 2010, 5:02 amAnderson says:
So no laws declaring all evil people are detainable without process? Why not? Seems like a useful tool for a good society.
It all depends on the campaign. The kind of society that imprisoned evil alignments regardless of overt acts, and that took regular steps to detect evil people, would surely be stifling in other aspects as well.
As I used to have to remind players, “evil” does not mean “Blofeldian.” The greedy landlord, the gossiping widow, the nagging spouse, may well be “evil” in alignment, even without a propensity to drown infants and conquer the world. Just as most “good” characters will not therefore wish to go on quests or give all their income to the poor.
I never had to do it, but a party over-focused on detecting evil can be foiled by setting up a red-herring evil NPC who doesn’t really care about the party, whilst a neutral NPC becomes their enemy simply because they impede his plans.
And yes, you can detect chaos, at least if you’re a lawful cleric. Not that chaos is usually hard to spot ….
December 18, 2010, 7:51 amChris W says:
A bit of a side note, but one of the best blog posts (not to mention an awesome set of comments) I’ve ever read is over at Javaworld:
10 Business lessons I learned from playing Dungeons and Dragons
On the first page you need to scroll down about halfway before you get to the non-spam good stuff.
If anyone is looking to get back into DnD, there’s a great Free-to-Play MMO version here.
December 18, 2010, 9:56 amKingpriest of Istar says:
If you can detect evil and read people’s minds,you can try to base a justice system on forcing people to be good. It’s not a great idea – it can lead to abandonment by the gods and a giant fiery mountain dropping on your capital.
December 18, 2010, 1:16 pmNick K. says:
This is actually an interesting proposition. As Anderson’s comment suggests, we’d have to consider multiple facets of the question: what alignment is the society under consideration?
Even D&D’s former (3.5 and earlier) alignment scale can’t fully reveal a society’s tendencies and preferences. Is it lawful good, lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good, or chaotic good? (Of course, the alignment scale can only imperfectly be applied to societies, but let’s follow the thought experiment anyway.)
A chaotic good society, whether putting more emphasis on its chaotic or good aspects, would almost certainly find such a law reprehensible given chaotic good’s focus upon individuality and freedom of personal choice (though a chaotic good society may have slightly less issue with the law, depending upon the tendencies of the individual in question and the particular situation).
A neutral good society, realizing the importance of balance yet devoted to the cause of good, might be willing to balance the possible damage caused by the individual under consideration against what seems to be the evil of imprisonment without overt action on the individual’s part. Of course, this somewhat begs the question, as the importance of overt evil or illegal action in a sentence of imprisonment is the focus of consideration in the first place. Nonetheless, it seems likely to me that a neutral good society would privilege individual choice over formalism in this instance.
Lawful good is a term that can cover a variety of tendencies. If a society were highly lawful, formalism might win the day, meaning that the law would be upheld (in a hypothetical D&D Supreme Court) by virtue of its status as a law enacted by the legislature (whether that be elected representatives, a hereditary monarch, or some other form), or simply because evil-in whatever form-is unlawful, and that’s that.
Further, a highly lawful (read: formalist) society might care less about where an individual falls on the good-neutral-evil axis, and more about their position on the law-neutral-chaos spectrum. If so, a lawful evil character would be just fine, as the classic description of such characters involves those seeking to advance their own interests within and through existing structures of law and society.
A lawful good society focused instead more on good, while emphasizing righteousness, might include freedom of conscience as one of its central virtues. In this case, it seems likely that the law would fall before a requirement of overt action.
Again, it seems that an examination of the law merely from an alignment-based perspective would be incapable of fully answering the question of whether a law ordering the detention of the evil without further process would actually be “useful”. We have to look at the society’s underlying values. For my own perspective, I’d find such a law misguided and tyrannical.
December 18, 2010, 4:45 pmD.R.M. says:
You could, in principle, pass a law against being evil. This would likely make it impossible to have clerics of evil gods in your kingdom, and that is likely to tick off the evil deities, who will then use their powers to mess up your country. How many plagues will your country weather before you stop persecuting the clergy of the god of disease?
December 18, 2010, 6:34 pmGuy says:
Well, yes. I don’t really know much about the D&D alignment system, but I would have thought that “We must stop evil, at any cost” would have fallen under one of the good alignments.
December 18, 2010, 7:26 pmNick K. says:
You’re correct – it’s just that the particular degree of zeal implied by “at any cost” could be present in several of the different “good” alignments, and could ultimately even lead to one falling outside of “good”.
December 18, 2010, 10:00 pmAs an example, check Ilya’s link on whether good characters can torture; the answerer points out that a paladin, a lawful good character, engaging in torture would lose his status as lawful good and fall to lawful evil, whereas a chaotic good character might be able to make a convincing argument that torture wouldn’t violate his personal moral code. Nerdy, but interesting to consider.
Anderson says:
whereas a chaotic good character might be able to make a convincing argument that torture wouldn’t violate his personal moral code
To no one’s surprise, I would rule out torture for good characters. A chaotic good PC’s commitment to individual rights would not comport with torture. The Sage Advice answer sounds a lot like “the ends justify the means,” which is a good indication you’re on the wrong end of the alignment graph.
… I’m blissfully unaware of the 4th ed. rules on alignment; I glanced through one of the rulebooks long enough to decide they were trying to dumb it down unacceptably, and picked up some 3.5 books online just in case I ever want to play it.
December 19, 2010, 6:19 amJ.T. Wenting says:
I’d say the US constitution would allow a ban on ammunition as well. It only states that “arms” are allowed, if ammunition is not classed as a weapon therefore it’s not protected by the 2nd ammendment (I don’t know if there’s jurispudence on that).
December 19, 2010, 6:28 amChris W says:
Not to be too nit-picky, but this describes a Lawful Neutral society, not Lawful Good
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_%28Dungeons_%26_Dragons%29
December 19, 2010, 8:05 pmNick K. says:
I realize that a heavy emphasis on formalism might push a society toward neutrality, but the thought experiment specifically called for a good society.
December 19, 2010, 11:14 pmNonetheless, I agree – a society whose major concern was the rule of law qua law, rather than justice, would fit more within the lawful neutral box.
Mojo Bison says:
1) There are inherent dangers in the use of profiling methods, even in a magical world. Alignments can be disguised without the victim’s knowledge, wizards bribed, innocent parties Geas’d into criminal acts. One mini-adventure from a 1980s Dragon involved an elf framed for murder: he fled the crime because a weapon with Detect Evil singled him out –as it turned out, the weapon also possessed the previously-unknown property of Detect Elf…
2) Somewhere or other –methinks some sourcebook for Outer Planes adventures (1st or 2nd ed)– there was an adventure involving characters going to the first layer of the Seven Heavens. In one of the libraries there was a tome arguing for the justifiable killing of evil creatures even in the absence of known criminal intent. So at least one Lawful Good source says it’s okay.
3) “Justice” is a tricky term. The Nine Hells are all about justice –it just has the hitch that the powerful are deemed as more deserving of the law’s protection (i.e., the favor of the Overlord Asmodeus) than the weak.
December 19, 2010, 11:35 pmCareless says:
And the stereotypical allignment for real world lawyers is around lawful evil
December 20, 2010, 12:58 amhallj says:
I disagree with the Sage’s advice on Lawful Good and Chaotic Good characters and torture. Lawful Good characters are required to be both “good” and “lawful”. Both alignments are required to be “Good” but where they differ is in where their definitions of “Good” derive from. In general, Lawful characters derive their ideals of good and evil from society at large. They are obliged to follow the laws their Order, God, or Government require. Chatotic characters derive their definition of “Good” from more internalized sources. The Chaotic Good character is not bound by external definitions of good or evil, only by his own moral compass, whatever that may be.
So if a Lawful Good paladin is an Inquisitor, one charged by his order with extracting information from demon worshipers and other heretics, the situation may require torture. It may even be a violation of his alignment for him to refuse a lawfully issued order to torture a prisoner. For the Paladin, conflicts between what the Law requires, and what his own personal sense of Good is, may often come into conflict.
By contrast, a Chaotic Good rogue would not be required to engage in torture even if ordered to do so, and even if the prisoner has information that might serve the greater good. Actually, the rouge is required by his alignment to refuse to comply with any order he found personally repugnant. For the Chaotic Good character, whether the order to torture was lawful or nor would not matter, only whether the act itself was good or evil. The conflict for the Chaotic Good character would come not from the conflict between what he feels is right and what he has been ordered to do, but from his own internal struggle to balance individual rights against the need to serve the greater good.
December 20, 2010, 11:03 amUnder this formulation, whether or not a Lawful Good character is more or less likely to torture a prisoner than a Chaotic Good character would depend more on the law of the land or on the laws of the Lawful character’s Order. Perhaps the Sage simply assumed that all “Good” religions and governments would have banned torture as a matter of law.
Nate the Great says:
I used to tell my players that the good-evil axis described the ends your character purused, and the law-chaos axis described the means you pursued those ends. Therefore, a Chaotic Good character would pursue noble goals, but might not always use noble methods (think Jack Bauer). On the other hand, a Lawful Evil character would pursue selfish goals, but would do so using legitimate and legal methods.
December 20, 2010, 6:56 pmohwilleke says:
One of the “Second Amendment” issues in D&D is that the game has no firearms, as it would detract from the swords and sorcery character of the game, and upset the delicate balance between too easy and too hard.
One notable set of alternative rules my own little band of players worked with, however, was to allow guns and cannons, to give the game something of a steampunk flair, so long as they weren’t materially more effective than existing weapons – freezing the technology at muzzleloading, inaccurate firearms that were the rough equivalent of crossbows in effectiveness.
Interestingly, many state hunting laws do the same thing, allowing hunting for much of the hunting seasons only with inferior techology weapons.
December 20, 2010, 8:07 pmStew says:
Laws regarding the regulation of ammunition fall under the protections of the 2nd Amendment: A firearm is not very effective without the fire.
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